The story
Welcome to Reading
Reading stands on the ridge that divides the waters of Lake Erie from those of the St. Joseph, at a crossroads once called Basswood Corners. A farming township without a store until 1850, it grew into a busy village after a plank road and then the railroad of 1869, was incorporated in 1873 and became a city in 1934.
Reading was set off from Allen by the legislature of 1837. The settlers had asked for the names Columbus for the northern town and Troy or Utica for the southern, but those were already taken, and the legislature named them Litchfield and Reading, ‘supposed to have been taken’ from towns in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. The whole tract then held 227 people. The 1879 county history describes a high ridge in the east of the township culminating at Reading village, from which the streams run south and east to Lake Erie by the Little St. Joseph and the Maumee, and west and north to Lake Michigan by Hog Creek and the St. Joseph. The water flowing north runs into a chain of lakes once marked on the survey maps as the Hog Lakes, the largest of them now Long Lake.
The first settler was John Mickle, who came from Oswego, New York, by way of Maumee, Ohio, and reached his land on October 5, 1835, opening the first road south from Jonesville by way of Sand Creek. His cabin of unhewn logs, 19 by 23 feet, sheltered the families of thirteen settlers while they chose their land, and three years later he replaced it with a house of squared black-walnut logs. The first town meeting was held at his house on April 3, 1837. The settlers traded with the Indians for meat and maple sugar, and the history notes that the Indians would take only silver in exchange.
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About 1840, with 331 people in the town, a mail route from Hillsdale was won by a group that slipped a petition signed in Adrian into the department’s hands, so that Ralph Bailey, not Mickle, became postmaster, with Daniel Kinne as deputy; George Fitzsimmons carried the mail once a week for $26 a year. Up to 1850 there was not a store, grocery or hotel in the town. The site chosen for a village was Basswood Corners, named for a clump of seven basswood trees growing from one stump near the corner of sections 22, 23, 26 and 27, where the State road and the Jonesville road met.
Horace Billings opened a blacksmith shop at the corner in 1846, and Morris Inglesby a shop for grain cradles; Dr. William Hullinger built the first frame house and in 1853 a hotel that became the Reading House. Looking ahead to the Hillsdale and Reading plank road, David D. Prouty and Thomas Fuller platted a village on their land at the corner; the plank road was finished in 1855 and given up after a couple of years. William F. Turner and George Young built a steam sawmill in 1852, Nelson M. Turner opened the first store at Main and Michigan streets, and in 1856 a steam grist mill was built.
The township bonded itself for $15,000 to bring the railroad from Jackson toward Fort Wayne through the village, and the first regular train from Jackson arrived on November 9, 1869. Business was believed to have quadrupled. Reading was incorporated as a village by a special act of April 12, 1873, one mile square, and Asahel B. Strong was elected the first president on April 14; a three-story brick school opened on November 4, 1873. A fire that started at a livery stable on August 25, 1899, destroyed ten business blocks, four homes and eight barns, and in 1900 the village had 1,096 people. Reading became a city in 1934, and the 2020 census counted 1,095.
